Economic

Strategy for attracting new users

Nengjie Zhang Leave a comment

In order to make more students know the useful and convenient system, we recommended some marketing strategies:

  • Use social media to expand this system profile, such as Facebook, Twitter.
  • Cooperate with universities, it is a better way to let this system into university official system.
  • Put more advertising in public places.
  • If this system will charge, better to free to everyone in the first three month.
  • Invite some professional people like professor or well-know student to use this system, and then expand the reputation to increase more students to download this system.

Economic context

Yang Wang Leave a comment

As the social media platform for module reviews, the benefit for the Lessonplan is not only to provide a convenient approach to the university and students, there are also commercial aspects for the social network. Because of the Lessonplan need staff to engage in the work like platform management and data maintenance. So the university and the students need profit from the platform. The economic context for the module reviews platform should be related to the stakeholders (university, students) of the platform.

The economic value for the university

For the university, the first benefit is the feedback and the rate of each modules from students. This will assist them to improve the modules quality and confirm the module aim, which will greatly expand the influence of the unviersity and attract more students all over the world. Then the economic value will profit the university. And the sponsers for the society will assist the platform to generate more job opportunities for the university. So the idea for the university is the university could integrate this platform with the SUSSED website or the SUSU website.

The economic value for the students

The students using this Lessonplan could also be benefit by having a quality modules. The platform can also provide a place of work for students, because some posts could be qualified by the capable students such as someone that is expert at the database can help with the data maintenance. If it provide the part job to the students, more new user will attract to the platform.

The Lessonplan economically viable

The economically viable of the Lessonplan could be general show in the Cost Breakdown. If the university can promote the platform, the system will be more and more mature. The scope of the Lessonplan is that the platform could be the module reviews system through the university all over the UK or even the world.

Cost Breakdown

Sam Leave a comment

Running costs of Lessonplan are predicted to be rather low. Primary costs will be time spent creating the system, the the time spent installing it at customer universities and any relevant support related costs.

Our service will be offered to numerous universities across the UK (for now) as a white label software solution. It is a web-application that will need to be hosted on web servers.

Two options will exist for client universities: hosting on their existing servers or an external provider. The latter will cost more for the university but will not cost any extra for us. Both of these options cost us nothing. If the customer wishes for us to provide external hosting, we will use a cloud server from DigitalOcean at a cost of £52 per month (all of which is forwarded to the customer).

Because we are a team containing web developers, the development costs will be very low, we will be using open source frameworks rather than proprietary software to develop the product. We also anticipate that support for the system will be minimal due to a test driven design methodology, designed to minimise the number of bugs that make it into production installations. Once the product is developed however, running costs drop off significantly further and the profit increases exponentially as we roll the system out to more universities very cheaply (with a typical set-up time of 6 man hours).

We don’t require any office space as we can work remotely and communicate via Skype and project management platforms such as Trello.

We may invest variable amounts of money in marketing the platform. This will involve travelling for meetings at potential universities to discuss our solution. This figure could range anywhere from £30 to £150 per visit.

We expect universities themselves will promote the use of the system by their students once they have purchased it. This negates any cost for us to perform this promotion ourselves.